The New Skift

SKIFT INTRODUCING SKIFT INTELLIGENCE What we built, why, and who built it. Skift Take: A year ago, we asked what Skift would look like if we started it today. This is the answer: Skift Intelligence, and a company rebuilt around the decisions travel’s leaders have to make. A year ago, we asked ourselves one question: if we were starting Skift all over again in 2026, what would it look like, and how would people use it? You’re looking at the answer. “I read Skift”→“I use Skift” For fourteen years, people have said “I read Skift.” Now they can say “I use Skift.” That is the whole change, in one word. Skift has become the decision engine for the business of travel: fourteen years of journalism, research, events, and advisory work, brought together with one point of view and pointed at the decisions the people who run this industry have to make. We call it Skift Intelligence. How Skift Intelligence works Travel has never had more information: news, data, reports, earnings calls, conferences, and now an endless supply of AI summaries of the internet. Almost all of it stops one step before the decision. A deal announcement tells you what happened, not whether to change your plans. AI is making information cheaper every month, and judgment more valuable. Three things don’t get cheaper: knowledge nobody else has, a point of view on what it means, and access to the people who make the decisions. Skift has all three. Yes, Skift Intelligence is AI, and it has been since May 2023, when we launched Ask Skift as one of the first answer engines built entirely on a single body of work: ours. This is the third version, and it is much more than an answer engine. The difference from everything else is simple: generic AI gives you the internet’s answer. Skift Intelligence gives you Skift’s answer, grounded in fourteen years of our work and the primary sources behind the industry, and every factual claim is backed by a source you can inspect. What Skift knows 14 years of reporting · Research · Our frameworks · The stages · Live trackers · Primary filings The record of the business of travel since 2012 — and the judgment built on it. A body of work no generic AI has. Skift Intelligence You ask→Skift answers→You decide Not the internet’s consensus. Skift’s view. Every claim backed by a source you can inspect. Built for the Skift 5000 The people who move travel’s money, assets, and capacity. Roughly five thousand of them. Everyone who works with them gets Skift, made sharper. How the new Skift works, in one picture. Think of it as a senior analyst who has read everything Skift has ever published, attended every event we’ve hosted, learns what you’re working on, and, unlike most analysts, tells you what she’d do. You ask a real question: a market, a competitor, a deal. Skift answers. Then you decide. Who Skift Intelligence serves We built it first for the roughly 5,000 people who decide where travel’s money, assets, and capacity go next: the Skift 5000. Not a ranking or a list, but the group of decision-makers we intend to understand better than anyone else. I explain who they are and why they matter in The Next Dollar, published today. They are who we build for first, not the only people we serve: everyone who works in and around this industry lives with their decisions, and everyone who subscribes to Skift gets the same intelligence, made sharper. What’s changing, and what’s not We’ve rebuilt every Skift product around one test: what decision does this serve, and who makes it? If we couldn’t answer that in one sentence, the work wasn’t ready. Major stories now carry a Skift Verdict: what this news changes for the people who have to act on it. Our data trackers update continuously, because quarterly reports go out of date and decisions can’t wait. The first, on capital allocation, has been running since August. Our events extend beyond the room, with a briefing before, takeaways during, and a verdict report after. And Skift.com itself is built around decisions rather than a feed of headlines, with Intelligence built into every page rather than added on as a chatbot. Live todaySkift Intelligence, the new homepage and story pages, your Daily Brief personalized to your profile, the new look everywhere, and the new research experience. Coming nextMore workflows and a mobile app. I’d rather tell you the order than pretend it’s all finished. What isn’t changing: the reason people came to Skift in the first place. We still publish every day. We still have opinions and say them out loud. Nobody at Skift has ever been told to spike a story, and nobody will be. The newsroom and the business side stay separate. Same standards, same independence, a much clearer purpose. Who built it A relaunch like this is a year of extra hours from people who also had a company to run. Our creative team, led by Melissa Carter, who was also our lead project manager, carried the new identity into every page, deck, and stage. Jason Clampet, our Chief Product Officer and my co-founder, shaped what Skift Intelligence is. Our development team, led by Mike Linden for the last decade, built it. Dan Marcec, our Intelligence Editor, came in and made all of it a reality. Rachel Mines, our Head of Subscriptions, was in the planning from the first day. Anne Duffy, my Chief of Staff and SVP of Growth, held the whole operation together. Charming Robot, our agency, took a brief that said bold, irreverent, confident, and gave us exactly that. And people across the company pitched in, in more ways than I can list here. I’ve never been prouder of this group. The next dollar Fourteen years ago, we started Skift by following the last dollar: where travelers spent their money, and what it meant for the industry. Today we follow the next one: the money the industry decides to spend, before any traveler makes a choice. Same purpose, better tools. Read the companion essay: The Next Dollar — who moves travel’s money, and why we’re counting them.